Network Musings, Feb 08, 2010

When I read articles touting an tech certification earning more money than another, I often wonder if the reason for the income differential isn’t some self-serving in-industry backscratch to promote the certification (through government regulations, laws, etc) rather than provide some real return on investment.

In a follow-up article, Brodkin reported on a survey carried out for the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, (ISC)^2, which showed “that holders of the CISSP, SSCP or CAP certifications who work in the Americas and have at least five years experience earn [an average of] $102,376 per year – more than $21,000 higher than IT pros who also have five years experience but lack the certifications.”

Juniper gets interviewed about their focus for next year. Though I’m having a hard time believing that reducing tiers in datacenters will reduce complexity. It’s more like it increases a company’s reliance upon a single vendor; and when you start making your layers do more, it definitely becomes more complicated requiring higher paid engineers with certifications.

When you reduce a tier, a layer, by definition you save in cost, you save in power and you have better latency that translates to better performance. So this is why we’re winning a number of data center deals — including the New York Stock Exchange — with our two-tier approach, the fixed configuration EX3200 and EX4200 in the front, and the modular EX 8200 switches in the back. And very frequently, MX will become part of the equation when the customer looks at edge routing.

Google Mystery Domain (1e100.net) takes up a lot of internet traffic. Doing 3 minutes of analysis, I’m of the opinion this is for non-search (i.e. non www.google.com) interfacing traffic, like that from chrome, apps, etc.

Teen Blogging is in decline. It’s the closed feedback loop coupled with ADHD. Why blog if no one reads? Why write if no one reads? Twitter thought it had cornered the market on blogs, because everyone liked SMS at 140 characters, why not microblogs. Now if you have no followers, whats the point of Tweeting? Twitter quickly de-evolving into a secondary market channel for Celebrities / Famous People / And Businesses.

“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.”

“It relied on the fact that the encryption was unknown and hence could not be broken. This is a case where something that has some potential for being strong is broken by just this one design decision that in any public review would have been spotted immediately.”